The Challenge
Atlassian's enterprise customers were managing multiple products (Jira, Confluence, Loom, and emerging AI agents) through fragmented admin experiences. Each product had its own admin interface, creating cognitive overhead, inconsistent governance, and friction for IT teams managing large-scale deployments.
The opportunity: unify the admin experience into a single, coherent platform that scales from setup to enterprise-level optimisation.
Insight
Enterprise admins were spending an average of 3x more time on routine management tasks due to context-switching between product-specific admin panels.
My Role
As Lead Product Designer, I was responsible for the end-to-end design vision and execution across multiple product teams. This included:
- Defining the design strategy and interaction framework
- Leading a cross-functional team of designers, engineers, and PMs
- Aligning stakeholders across Growth, Platform, and Commerce divisions
- Establishing design principles for the unified admin model
Discovery & Systems Mapping
I began by mapping the existing admin landscape across all four products. Through contextual inquiry with enterprise admins and internal stakeholder interviews, I identified the core friction points: duplicated controls, inconsistent mental models, and missing cross-product visibility.
Design Framework
I developed a unified admin framework built around three principles: progressive disclosure (complexity on demand), cross-product coherence (one mental model), and actionable intelligence (surfacing what matters). This framework became the foundation for all design decisions.
Iterative Delivery
Working in close partnership with engineering, I delivered the experience through iterative milestones, each validated through enterprise customer beta programmes and quantitative analysis of admin task completion rates.
Key Decisions
Key Decision
We chose to build a unified navigation shell rather than linking between separate admin panels. This was a larger technical investment but created a fundamentally better mental model for admins managing multiple products.
Key Decision
I advocated for an AI-assisted admin dashboard that surfaces anomalies and recommendations proactively, rather than requiring admins to manually audit settings across products. This became a key differentiator in the enterprise sales motion.
Outcomes
The unified admin experience launched as part of Atlassian's T25 milestone, delivering measurable impact:
Outcome
The redesigned admin experience contributed to $100M+ in enterprise revenue pipeline growth and a 13.4% improvement in funnel conversion, validating the hypothesis that admin experience quality directly influences enterprise purchasing decisions.
Reflections
This project reinforced my belief that admin experiences are not secondary surfaces. They are the foundation of enterprise trust. The design decisions we made about admin clarity, AI-assisted governance, and cross-product coherence directly shaped how large organisations evaluated and adopted Atlassian's platform.
The biggest lesson: in enterprise design, the admin is your most important user. Their experience determines whether your product scales.